My last lesson: an ICT lesson

For our intensive practice period, we, teachers to be, were asked to design and teach an ICT lesson. All of us were well aware of the theory related to the topic: an approach to teaching which involved the introduction of Information and Communication Technologies. This sounded great, and as students we have been part of this type of lesson but now it was our time, and we had to put into practice what we knew about this acronym. This is what the practice period is about, isn’t it?
The name of the unit I was dealing with was “The Media” and we have been working with lots of articles and the passive voice structure so, the most appropriate task to assign was writing an article. The approach to writing was process writing but the question was how to transform an ordinary writing lesson into an ICT writing lesson. Arriving at the answer was not so difficult. The first thing I did was look for an online tool to create newspaper articles. This meant googling “how to create a newspaper article” and the answer was there. I was lucky enough to find a tool which was not only effective but also incredibly easy to use. You just needed to type inside the blank boxes and after a click your article was there, ready to be downloaded and printed. I created a short article myself to be used as model for the writing. This was the most interesting part of my lesson: my students reading a newspaper article which seemed to have been cut out from a real newspaper and the topic of which was how the performance of class 1st A had improved, how their performance in the English class had improved. They found it really funny and their faces showed their astonishment. The lesson went on as an ordinary process writing lesson up to the moment in which I wrote the name of a website on the blackboard and my e-mail address. Students were supposed to create, with what they had written, a newspaper article alike the model they had been working with. They weren’t used to be asked to work with their beloved computer very often. So, they were really excited about it. They created the articles, attached them to an e-mail and send it to me. It was group work so the articles were not many; I created a slideshow with them and sent it to my students. All of us enjoyed the experience. ICT lessons are easier to design than what we think and they are remarkably effective. TOOL